The Tower of Babel - Gained In Translation, October 2018/5779

Google translate.

Instant simultaneous translation apps.

And other technologies are making achieving understanding between people who speak different languages close to seamless.

Douglas Adams would be pleasantly surprised that the BabelFish, the universal translator he describes in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is on the horizon, in a tech form, of course with Google’s aptly named Babelfish earbuds that are supposed to instantly translate 40 languages.

In our reading from Parshat Noach this week, we read the Tower of Babel story – that’s where Doug Adams got his inspiration.  He noticed how God decides to scatter the people who create the Tower, not only geographically, but also make them speak different languages – so that they will never again conspire the way they did to overtake heaven.

You’d think it odd for the Torah to suggest at the beginning of the reading that the fact of everyone speaking the same language is negative, that it somehow leads to the building project and subsequent dispersal.  But that’s the clear implication.

Don’t we all want to be on the same page, as we say, speaking the same language?  Able to hear and understand each other?  

And what makes this even more perplexing is Rashi explains the one language everyone was speaking there was Hebrew.  Wow! Try to imagine that instead of English, Hebrew is the lingua franca!  I’m trying to imagine Hebrew with a thick Brooklyn or Texas drawl.

But no, better God says that we strive to figure out what each other’s saying, better that we have the benefit of the way different languages can say things with subtleties and connotations our own language sometimes cannot.

There is a lesson for us here in our synagogue community – all of us pretty much are English speakers first, but as Winston Churchill famously said about the United States and England, ‘We are two countries separated by a common language.’

We each of us speak, both verbally and nonverbally, with such different words, rhythms – making it all the more important to listen, process, and put words into context, not only listening to the words, or observing the body language, but doing our best each time to see the whole person - because after all if the synagogue is at least in part a business, it is a people centered business – and while our goal should not be to build a tower into heaven, our goal should be to build a heavenly tower where, as I believe, as a person who loves to study languages, that everything is gained in translation.